[Asterisk-video] Videophone based network

[Joseph Gwynne-Jones]

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Joseph Gwynne-Jones and I am 
profoundly deaf.

I work for a national charity for the Deaf - BDA - the website is 
http://www.signcommunity.org.uk

As you can see, the focus is on the use of sign language. Within the 
organisation, many of the staff are deaf, and also they all use BSL 
(British Sign Language) as their first language. Some of the hearing 
staff also can use BSL.

My job with them is that I'm their Linux & Windows System Administrator 
- looking after their entire ICT infrastructure dotted in offices 
located all across the UK. We also provide a VRS - Video Relay System.

Now that's out of the way! :-) I've joined this group because I'm 
looking to provide a solution that I don't think have really been done 
before - I want to provide a full complete videophone network - so that 
like in a typical office - you would see that every staff have their own 
telephone. I want to provide the same for the BDA - using videophones - 
so every staff would be able to call each other on the videophone with 
ease. I'll also like to have a conference videocall for this as well.

The telephone to use can be something like the Grandstream GXV3000 IP 
Videophone which is a SIP videophone using H264 video codec. Sound 
obviously isn't important as we would be conversing in sign language 
however since we do have hearing staff, they'll have a VoIP capacity as 
well.

Finally as we're a charity - we're always short of money so I look at 
opensource/freeware solutions to give us what we need.

During my looking around, I came across Asterisk which look like it have 
the potential to do what I am looking for except it make no mention of 
video even though it can do SIP until I found this email group.

Excellent I'm glad that there are like-minded people that are thinking 
of videophones. Should I be successful, then naturally we'll release 
loads of PR about it and hopefully get ourselves onto BBC (via a TV 
programme called See Hear)

I'll describe the network setup a bit:

In each Regional Office - we have two ADSL lines which all are currently 
getting upgraded to 8Mbs/800Kbs via BT Broadband Business (unlimited 
bandwidth) - the 800Kbs upload probably means we could have at least 2 
videocall going in/out of the office at any time - could Asterisk allow 
me to limit the number of videocalls? (ideally we'll love to have SDSL, 
but they cost too much)

We have 6 primary Regional Offices - each one have a Linux server 
(Debian Sarge) providing the usual office stuff (Samba, DNS, etc) and 
the number of staff in each one is quite small - on average about 10 
staff so I don't expect to see a large volume of videocalls to drown the 
800Kbs upload bandwidth for each office :-)

I'll like to link up all 6 Regional offices within a videophone network. 
I'll be interested to hear from you folks if you think that's easily 
done with Asterisk? With H.264 video codec (video quality is going to be 
very important) and using either hardware-based or software based 
videophone for the whole network (for the mobile users with laptop's, 
they would use a software based such as the Vcon vPointHD which is 
H323/SIP capable videophone software with H264 video codec so that they 
can dial home)

Finally if the whole thing works well, I would then use it to improve 
the VRS system - allowing a more localised service - one thing about the 
use of BSL is that it's very strong on use of regional signs - the sign 
language used in Belfast isn't quite the same as the one used in London 
so we could allow the use of regional service - ie users will dial to a 
"national" VRS and then request Belfast based sign language - the call 
can then be forwarded to interpreters in Belfast

Asterisk could run on the servers (they're old, but they will be 
replaced with dualcore P4 servers from Dell) in the regional offices.

I'll like to hear your suggestions and feedback

Cheers

-- 
Joseph Gwynne-Jones
Linux & Windows System Administrator
Sign Community (BDA)